In response to Gwendolyn and Ross

I think I can see where both of you are coming from. On the one hand, I sympathize with Gwendolyn in that I, too, find it difficult to say to someone "I know what you're going through" when I haven't had the same experience myself, but at the same time, I think what Ross is getting at is that we can attempt to understand what that person might be feeling. For example, the death of a parent would generally vary in impact than the death of a pet. However, knowing how one felt when one's pet had died, one can imagine that suffering the death of a parent would be much worse than losing a pet. Similarly, as the readings had mentioned about mothers losing their children, I think it would be difficult for most of us who have experienced the death of a loved one to be able to relate fully to the mother who has lost a child. So, while we are able unable to describe exactly what the mother must be feeling, we are able to empathize with her, in that we know that what the mother is going through must be worse than what we had been through.